Love it or hate it, Microsoft’s Copilot companion is at the core of its new AI-focused strategies right now, and that’s even trickling into the Xbox side of the business with the new “Gaming Copilot,” which has been in testing with Xbox Insiders for a few months now.
Starting today, the rapidly improving Xbox Gaming Copilot is officially beginning its general rollout to gamers across Windows PCs and mobile devices — granted, with a “Beta” tag still attached to it (and not in mainland China). The former will be through the Xbox Game Bar, while the latter will be through the Android and iOS Xbox mobile app in October.
Equipped with a hands-off voice mode and the tools to offer tips, tricks, and recommendations based off what you’re playing, your achievements, and your play history, the Gaming Copilot could become a useful part of the Xbox ecosystem. Console players will have to wait longer, though, as Microsoft is continuing to optimize the companion for gaming handhelds and consoles for a release down the line.
What can Xbox Gaming Copilot actually do?
If you’re familiar at all with Microsoft Copilot, built on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and heavily pushed on every Windows 11 PC nowadays, then you’ve got the gist of this gaming-specific version.
Gaming Copilot is tapped into your Xbox account, so it can see your play history, your achievements, and more. It can also see what you’re doing in real-time, and all this information allows it to answer gaming-related questions.
You can ask Xbox’s Gaming Copilot for a walkthrough on getting through a difficult level, hints on how to solve puzzles or beat bosses, recommendations based on your most-played games or favorite genres, information on how to earn specific achievements, advise for which game you should play or achievement you should earn next, and more.
We’ve all reached for our phone to hurriedly search for answers to our gaming-related questions, and half of Gaming Copilot is simply making that easier and more accessible. The other half is using our history as gamers to make recommendations and suggestions more relevant to us.
Is it actually useful to have around? That largely depends on the end user experience, but Xbox has already improved Gaming Copilot over the last few months of testing with deeper understanding of what’s happening on screen, a more intuitive voice mode, and better in-game coaching, and it’ll certainly continue to improve while it has that “Beta” tag attached.
At least one improvement we know is coming at some point is even wider access on more devices.
When will Gaming Copilot come to Xbox consoles?
Right now, Gaming Copilot (Beta) is rolling out to Xbox users 18 and older in every region Copilot is supported (apart from mainland China), beginning with the Xbox Game Bar app on PC, then with the Android and iOS mobile apps in October.
So, you may be wondering… Where are the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S? Apparently, Xbox is working on “optimizing” Gaming Copilot for gaming handhelds (like the upcoming Xbox Ally) and consoles, with a release planned for the near future.
Gaming handhelds are basically Windows PCs, so Gaming Copilot will be available for them starting today, too, but Microsoft may be planning handheld-specific UI and performance improvements. Those improvements will be crucial for Xbox consoles, which are almost entirely controller-based and have very limited system resources to spare for any feature that isn’t gaming.
I’m also curious if Xbox intends for Gaming Copilot to eventually come to Xbox Cloud Gaming in some form, but there’s no word on that right now.
I was tempted to dismiss Gaming Copilot out of hand, as I haven’t found much use for the regular Copilot or other AI companions in my day-to-day life, but I do often grab my phone to make quick searches while gaming. If Gaming Copilot is easy to access, easy to use, quick to return results, and accurate enough to be trusted, I can see myself relying on it. I also wouldn’t mind some help picking which of the hundreds of video games on my backlog I should play next.
No matter how I personally feel, though, Microsoft is all-in on artificial intelligence, and I’m not surprised to see Copilot make the leap to the Xbox side of things.
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